Chapter 18 Chapter Eighteen

That night, while Claire was sleeping on my couch, I had a dream.Not a nightmare, not even related to meeting Clay.It was me who dreamed.I watch myself in my apartment, but the apartment is what it was when my mother was alive.In fact, she was alive in the dream, but lying sickly in bed.I was making her soup and chatting yelling across the corridor.She likes to communicate with me like this.The dream is like a movie without the soundtrack.I could see everything, see our lips move, but couldn't hear what was being said. Then I noticed something odd.I'm stirring the soup with my right hand.Not unusual, I know, but I'm left-handed, very left-handed, don't use my right hand for anything.But I was stirring the soup, salting, peppering, and so on with my normally useless right hand.Like looking in a mirror, I thought in my dream, and wondered, have I ever stirred soup with my right hand?There is a possibility, right?But then I realized that I was wearing the watch on my left wrist in the dream, like a right-handed person, which was terribly wrong.Next thing I noticed was that there was more hair on the back of the hand in the dream than usual, a little bit more, but still a lot.I had a strange feeling, and the sense of panic gradually rose, gradually climbing up my chest.Then I realized that in my dream I was wearing blue socks, navy blue, which is absolutely impossible because I only wear white or black socks.And the texture seems to be wool, which is also unlikely because wool makes my feet sweat.I looked carefully, like zooming in on the camera, the lines of my face in the dream were different from those when I was awake.The wrinkles on the forehead are gone, and the nasolabial folds on both sides of the mouth are very deep.A blue vein runs across my right temple and into my hairline, and I don't have that.I realize it's not me.This man is not me.

But it's too late now.He was already walking down the corridor to my mother's room with a soup bowl on a plate, a spoon and a napkin under one arm, and a salt shaker under the other, because no matter how much salt you add, she doesn't think it's salty enough, and he walked silently. Whistling.Suddenly I knew, I knew he was Death, Death for my mother.I started screaming to warn her, but it was a silent world, as if underwater, and the scream floated out of my mouth feebly and was carried away by the current, and no one could hear it except myself, because I was suddenly in my mother's bed. Waking up, sweating, running to the mirror.For one crazy moment, not fully awake, my eyes not yet adjusted to the light, before I remembered that the world in the mirror was upside down, I reached up to my right temple and thought I saw that blue vein.